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June 06, 2005
Yes there is a cost to "acting white" in schools
A serious paper has appeared in which the authors argue, based on a large and detailed sample size (90,000 students in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health), that students in American schools react differently to other students based on their GPA.
In a nutshell: if you are white (European-American), the higher your GPA, the more friends you have. A simple, linear relationship.
If you are black (African-American) you get more friends the higher your GPA up to a point and that point is a B+ GPA. Beyond that point, the higher your GPA, the less friends you get.
If you are Hispanic (self-identified ethnic category), once you get more than a C+ GPA, you get less friends the higher your GPA gets. Sadly, for an Hispanic 4.0 student, they have the least friends of any other grouping within the Hispanic set of students.
This social cost to high GPA students goes away in schools which are not racially mixed, nor is it seen in private schools. Given this, are racially mixed schools beneficial to either African-American students or Hispanics?
The paper can be seen as weak on some fronts (why is same-race friends the key metric? - should you really judge quality of friends the way they do in this paper?) but it seems important to me.
This is the link to the paper (PDF)
Posted by rakhier at June 6, 2005 09:12 PM